There are a couple posts from popular newsletters that have been making the rounds recently which decry so-called climate catastrophism, one by Matt Yglesias and one by Ruy Teixeira. Both engage in the timeless tradition of scolding leftist activists, this time for their ostensibly hyperbolic and unpopular rhetoric around the potential effects of the climate crisis. This is wrong: we are staring down dire possibilities and should not pretend otherwise.
Teixeira cites two recent public opinion polls asking people about their policy priorities, and climate change came in way behind a variety of other issues. These types of polls are meaningless on multiple levels and do not tell you anything useful beyond perhaps what the media has been focused on recently. Proper climate action like a Green New Deal would benefit all working class people with better health, better jobs, better housing, more material security, and more leisure. Teixeira also states that “the climate left…now dominates the Democratic party and preaches a catastrophism that permits no debate.” This is a ridiculous assertion as lifelong centrists and wealthy donors still run the party. The Biden administration is approving more drilling permits than Trump did and continuing to increase the polluting Pentagon’s budget. Additionally, Teixeira claims that “intermittency problems intrinsic to wind and solar…have predictably led to energy price spikes and shortages in unfavorable conditions for these technologies.” This is a demonstrably false fossil fuel industry talking point.
To his credit, Yglesias makes the correct point that taking action to stop the climate crisis can help alleviate anxiety about it, and that we need changes on the policy level. He is also correct that it is important to think about climate change as a range of possible outcomes in which every iota of less warming is an improvement rather than thinking in an all-or-nothing, 1.5°C or apocalypse binary (1.5°C is the widely accepted best-case scenario target that now appears increasingly out of reach).
The overall theses of both Yglesias and Teixeira are based on the idea that we are making technological progress and that the worst-case scenarios are very unlikely. They highlight the recent IPCC report assigning a low probability to the worst outcomes, along with analysis estimating that every country meeting its Paris Agreement commitments will result in around 2.7°C of warming. Yglesias does correctly note that even 2-3°C of warming is an outcome that will result in serious harm (although he hedges this with a silly GDP-based theory of linear progress). But no country or corporation is anywhere close to being on track to meet any sort of carbon neutrality or Paris Agreement commitment; treating pledges as material outcomes is extraordinarily reckless. Greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing!
Additionally, this analysis is carbon reductionism exemplified. Not only are emissions still increasing, biodiversity is still collapsing and pollution is still accelerating. It is not even that we are progressing too slowly; in the measurements that truly matter, we are still going in the wrong direction. Fossil fuels are still being extracted and burned in increasing quantities, deforestation is still happening, the planet is awash in plastic, and industrial agriculture is stronger than ever.
Do technological improvements make the worst-case outcomes less likely? In some ways, to some degree. But the number of variables involved in predicting this are beyond comprehension, including unknown tipping points and feedback loops that could be set in motion, and they make a number of very significant assumptions, like newfound and continued progress alongside political stability. There are all sorts of secondary and tertiary socio-political effects that can come from ecological breakdown, like famine and nuclear war; the idea that we can accurately predict their unlikelihood seems like false precision to me. Republicans are trying to legally protect fossil fuels alongside other oppressive and undemocratic power moves, and these forces of reaction are on the rise globally.
While climate fatalism is indeed counterproductive, there is no evidence that it is in any way a popular belief, and there is no evidence that talking about the potential for catastrophic climate outcomes has any negative effect on policy progress (not to mention the fact that the most vulnerable are already experiencing significant climate and ecological breakdown). However, the liberal belief in high technology and eternal incremental progress exemplified by Yglesias and Teixera is an extraordinarily popular ideology among billionaires and rest of the ruling class, the people who actually hold the levers of power. This is a problem of self-serving, pollyannaish denialism, which is its own sort of fatalism that the underlying assumptions of our present society are optimal and beyond question.
As the saying goes, it is indeed easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. For capitalism’s largest beneficiaries and truest believers, it is impossible to imagine either scenario. The systems and structures that continue to produce our planetary crises are solidly intact, and confronting them requires imagining different ways of relating to each other and fighting to bring them into being.
If we do keep global warming under 2°C and make progress on repairing our biosphere, it will be largely because of the type of brave activists that centrists love to scold. It is hard for me to care much about people being slightly hyperbolic or wrong on the side of urgency; if anything, it makes sense to err in that direction given the stakes. Personally, I am vastly more concerned about the powerful people who are profiting from our existing conditions and preventing the transformative change that needs to happen. The rest of us should be worried and, most importantly, furious.